W. Timothy Garvey Part 7, New Research on Obesity

In part 7 of this Exclusive Interview, Dr. W. Timothy Garvey talks with Diabetes in Control Publisher Steve Freed during the AACE 2018 convention in Boston, MA about his opinion on new research on obesity and the most promising weight loss medications currently in development.

W. Timothy Garvey, MD, FACE is a professor and Director of the University of Alabama Diabetes Research Center in Birmingham.

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Transcript of this video segment:

Freed: Have you heard of anything? There is so much research going on and so many studies going on when it comes to obesity. Have you participated or have you read about something that you have a lot of hope for?

Garvey: Well, yes, I think there is a lot of new drugs being developed around these satiety hormones and their targets in the hypothalamus. Most of these are peptides so they will be injectable unless we can figure out a way to orally take peptides and work is being done there too. But doing combinations of these peptides, any one single medication that acts on one pathway. There’s so much redundancy and so many pathways creating excess calorie intake in patients with this disease that the more pathways you can hit, the more effective you’re going to be. So combinations of these medicines, including combinations of new peptides designed around satiety hormones that we really haven’t developed therapeutics for at this point, I think are really going to be the answer. There’s one glp-1 receptor agonist that we now have for diabetes, semaglutide, which is a once-a-week preparation that is one milligram. The company Novo Nordisk is developing this medication at a higher dose, 2.4 milligrams a week for a weight loss indication. Some of the early phase 2 data are very promising – really kind of bringing weight loss down into the level that we could achieve by lap band surgery. So we are beginning to close the gap between medications and bariatric surgery there. Of course, this medication is not on the market yet but it’s just an example of developing medications that are going to be more effective in the clinic.